Then and now: essays from my past that are essential to my writing toolkit

The stack is about three inches tall, about nine manilla file folders worth. In them are contained about three years of intense writing work I did as part of my undergraduate studies 15 years ago, while earning my degree in journalism with a minor in creative writing. The writing I crammed into those few years caused me to burn out and turn to the business world for employment immediately after college. It took me about five years to pick up a pen and notepad again, when I was hired as a reporter for a small rural newspaper in Wisconsin.

I remained at the Daily Citizen for only nine months. My beat of crime and county government didn't exactly bring out the passion of creative or feature writing that I was able to pursue in my college days. It did help to build my confidence, however. It affirmed the belief that I had what it took to be a reporter, even if news writing wasn't what I wanted to do.

After leaving the Citizen I didn't write much again. A couple years later I did start a blog where I would occasionally write personal essays and pop-culture commentaries. But they were few and far between and I would hardly say my best work. I've stuck with blogging though, and I see it as a way to continue evolving my craft, my process, my voice.

Since completing the courses themselves, I haven't read through or even looked at the essays, articles and fragmented notes in these manilla folders, and yet I have kept them. First storing them at my mother's house, and then paying to pack and ship them with me in my various moves around the country. And so here they sit on my desk again, a casuality from the fall-out of one of my famous office reoragnzation binges-- a lifestyle ritual of being an enthusiastic organizer. I ask myself, "What keeps me from just tossing these into the recycle bin if I never bother to read back through them?"

Well, today, I took a peek into the top folder: English 3104, Creative Writing. In it are assignments and essays I had written about a lot of different topics. Some were worksheet answers I had given in response to analyzing others' writing or process. Some were essays I had written describing very personal things in my life such as my parent's divorcing, my grandmother dying, coming of age as a disabled youth. Truth be told some of it is really crap, cliche filled with boring structure. But some of it is actually pretty good, better than I remembered, better than I currently give myself credit for as a writer.

Maybe that is why I have been keeping these folders all this time. Because I've always known that even though my life would take me in different directions over time, I would always come back to writing. And I knew from my gut that this stack of early writings, would be an essential part of my toolkit that would help guide my ultimate success.

It reminds me of the quote the late Steve Jobs once said: "In life, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards." Only time will tell how the dots of my writing process will connect. But I definitely believe that having the ability to look back at who I was then, when I wrote in college-- now, in the present day-- about events and milestone moments of my past, that I am still trying to understand and reflect upon in the present day, will only help to make me a stronger and more authentic writer. And that is something than I never would have been able to appreciate or foresee as a 20-year-old, as I do now, at 35. From my persepective this is one of the wonderfully mysterious miracles of getting older: learning, living, and loving to share yourself with the world.